This blog will be updated by his family while he is
gone on his mission for two years to Hungary.

Monday, February 9, 2015

The Book of Mormon

This week has been amazing!

We really didn't do anything for p-day today, because the other elders are up at Budapest doing interviews with the mission president, and shopping and stuff took longer than usual, but we are planning on having district pizza tonight! There's this pizza delivery place here, and all their pizzas are about five dollars, and they have like thirty flavors. I usually pair up with Höferl Elder, and one of us gets Hawaiian and the other gets gyros, and we split half and half, but sometimes it is fun to try a new flavor. There's this seafood flavor, that has bits of octopus on it, and it doesn't taste very good. Just thought I'd share that with you all! ;)

Just added a few email addresses that have been overdue so if this is your first email sorry for the delay. And if this is equivalent to spam, let me know that, too, and I'll take you off the list!

So remember that one new lady I told you all about, the one we gave a Book of Mormon to in front of the Spar in the rain? She is a steady investigator. So we met with her on Tuesday (I think) which was just about five days later, and she told us she had read 220 pages out of the Book of Mormon. She would have read more if it weren't for the fact that she had been writing a play by play summary of what was going on in the Book of Mormon in a notebook to help her remember the story better, as well as a summary she had written of the restoration of the church taken from the documents in the front of the Book of Mormon (testimony of Joseph Smith, etc.). She read portions of her Book of Mormon Journal to us and we talked about it with her, and the Restoration. When we met on Friday, she was somewhere in the 300s, and we talked about the plan of salvation and even a little bit about the gospel of Jesus Christ. She asked when she could be baptized. If everything works out, there will be a baptism for her on March 31. She came to church yesterday, and loved it. She made friends with the lady who has been coming to church every week, and E. drove her to the bus station -- she lives a little out of town, but she said that she wants to come to church every week! She is an amazing example of how we need to have a personal relationship with God and to act on it. We as missionaries can do a million things to help our investigators, but ultimately it is all up to them when it comes to making decisions. She read the Book of Mormon in her free time and made the sacrifice to keep on coming to Veszprém to meet with us and to come to church. There are people everywhere ready for the gospellllll!!!!!!!!!!! .... and know not where to find it. We are also hoping that E. will have the opportunity to be baptized on March 31, as the other invitations for baptism we extended to her were too soon... E. has followed through on our invitations to follow all the commitments we have extended so far -- word of wisdom, ten commandments, law of chastity, read the Book of Mormon (she started last week!!!!), attend church. We've been really blessed to have had the opportunity the meet with these two amazing investigators.

We got let in to these two older guys, who were brothers. When we asked them if they believed in God, one of them said, "no, we are communists" and the second one said "um, excuse me, butI believe in God, and I am definitely not a communist. We are devout Catholics." And the first one was like "hey, I'm not a Catholic, I'm a communist, and you know that." And they went back and forth about communism and catholicism -- it sounded as if they had had that conversation once or twice or maybe like a million times before. It was really funny. The communist had this ashtray in front of him, and he kept on scooping the ashes of used cigarettes into new paper and smoking the same stuff over and over again, paper and all. When he would finish one cigarette, he'd scoop the leftovers into a new paper and smoke that. It was pretty disgusting, and I think he went through like five cigarettes in the twenty minutes that we were there -- and I looked like his brother did the same thing from the matching ash tray on the other side of the table.

This week is going to be super busy! We are going up to Budapest for interviews tomorrow, and we are having our monthly zone training in Dunaújváros on Wednesday. Can't wait to see everyone there!!!

So we had the most people ever show up at an English class on Thursday -- seven people came to profi!!! It might not seem like a lot, but let me tell you -- it is progress!!! The topic of the class was music (guess who picked that subject ;) ). We started off by splitting into two groups and talking about our favorite genres, artists, albums, etc., and then we talked about words for different musical symbols and stuff, like half note, treble clef, etc. It was a good lesson. We also had English class on Saturday. There is this man, who always comes on Saturday, who reminds me a lot of Dieter F. Uchtdorf. He loves to talk about airplanes, and his time in the military as a pilot.

So, I love langos, that scone thing I always talk about, so much, I've made it like every day. But I don't think It's very healthy -- fried bread, salt, garlic, cheese, and sour cream... I tried to make it healthy the other day by putting a bunch of vegetables on it. It didn't taste that good. Which is funny, because I love vegetables!!!!

So I've spent a little more than two months in Veszprém, and it looks as I'm going to spend two more months here. I hope after this transfer I still stay here, I love Veszprém so much!!!! And in theory, it's possible. I've heard of two other missionaries who had only two areas their whole mission. I also want to go to Pápa, because there is someone there I want to contact. But enough about that -- the mission, after all, isn't about me, right??? ;)

So we have like three investigators in this one building that we tracted, so we are always over there having lessons with them. There is this one guy that lives there, maybe in his early twenties, and he saw us, and he told us, "I always see you guys hanging out around here, you shouldn't be here unless someone invites you." And we were like "oh, yeah, we meet with some people here, don't worry." And then he called the cops on us!!! When the cops came he strutted out and told them that these troublemakers were always hanging out in their suits, up to no good for sure, and that they said they were meeting with some people but that probably we were up to no good!!! The cops were like, "ok, you can go in now" to the kid and then were like to us, "yeah, don't know why he called, you're not doing anything wrong" and then left. It was actually pretty funny.